Movie review | The Grand Budapest Hotel: No room for logic at inn

Thursday

Mar 20, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 20, 2014 at 11:30 AM

Wes Anderson films are prized for their copious helpings of whimsy. In Rushmore, a high-school dramatist caps off his career with a miniaturized production inspired by Apocalypse Now. In the recent Moonrise Kingdom, two take-charge adolescents get hitched during their summer vacation.

Wes Anderson films are prized for their copious helpings of whimsy.

In Rushmore, a high-school dramatist caps off his career with a miniaturized production inspired by Apocalypse Now. In the recent Moonrise Kingdom, two take-charge adolescents get hitched during their summer vacation.

The writer-director often balances such improbable scenarios with relatable characters and knowing dialogue.

His imagination gets the better of him in The Grand Budapest Hotel. He cooks up not only a wholly unlikely murder mystery but also an eastern European country (prewar Zubrowka) in which to set the film.

Ralph Fiennes stars as M. Gustave, a hotel concierge — a profession that, in the world of this film, is among the world’s most stylish. He navigates the corridors of the Grand Budapest Hotel as if he owned them, bossing around lackeys — including freshly hired lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) — and humoring female guests with sweet nothings.

Fiennes breathlessly delivers lines that would be a mouthful for many other actors. But M. Gustave proves too thin a character around which to build a film, perhaps accounting for the many secondary characters who show up later.

Anointed in voice-over narration by the adult Zero (F. Murray Abraham) as “the most liberally perfumed man I’ve ever encountered,” M. Gustave is amusingly vainglorious but little else. Sitting beside the casket of a recently deceased patron, the well-off Madame D. (Tilda Swinton), he praises the cream that the morgue applied to her face.

It is the death of Madame D. around which the story pivots. A last-minute codicil to her will makes M. Gustave the owner of a painting, Boy With Apple, but her belligerent brood of children (including Adrien Brody) refuses to let it leave the family.

In time, M. Gustave is incarcerated, deemed responsible for her murder and forced to trade serving the guests of the Grand Budapest for offering bowls of mush to hardened inmates.

There is much more — too much for one relatively short movie.

Why must M. Gustave’s prison be surrounded by a crocodile-filled moat or the tools contributing to his eventual escape be sneaked into the prison encased in fine pastries?

The film also includes the intervention of a global alliance of concierges, a ski chase and at least three characters dangling precariously from cliffs or buildings.

Among the standouts in the supporting cast are Edward Norton as a sympathetic police inspector, Willem Dafoe as a goonlike heavy retained by Madame D.’s progeny and Harvey Keitel as a loquacious inmate whose talent for draftsmanship comes in handy. Their appearances, though, are often fleeting, making one wish for fewer characters with bigger roles.

The bewildering plot, with improbability upon improbability in a completely concocted milieu, is a cinematic sugar high: It is entertaining to watch as it unfolds, but its pleasures are transient.

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